The constraint
A new account has no winning creative to scale and no learning to inherit. Everything is a first guess.
What holds you back in that position is not budget, it is how many genuinely different ideas you have in market. Push more money through a handful of near-identical angles and you buy the same audience twice at a higher price. CPA climbs, and it looks like the platform is punishing you.
The outcome
Monthly spend moved from $1,183 to $8,418, a 7.1× increase, while CPA fell from $51.43 to $38.79, down 25%.
Spending seven times as much and paying a quarter less per acquisition is the signature of a creative constraint coming off. If the ceiling had really been budget, CPA would have risen.
The creative
The ads that produced those numbers, exactly as they ran.
Concept volume is the ceiling on a new account, not budget.
Money can only find new buyers if there are new ideas for it to travel through. Until the concept count moves, extra spend just buys the same people again at a worse price.